Contents

Background

Hydrogen was inspired by Bret Victor's ideas about the power of instantaneous feedback and the design of Light Table. Running code inline and in real time is a more natural way to develop. By bringing the interactive style of Light Table to the rock-solid usability of Atom, Hydrogen makes it easy to write code the way you want to.

You also may be interested in our latest project – nteract – a desktop application that wraps up the best of the web based Jupyter notebook.

Features

execute a line, selection, or block at a time

rich media support for plots, images, and video

watch expressions let you keep track of variables and re-run snippets after every change

completions from the running kernel, just like autocomplete in the Chrome dev tools

code can be inspected to show useful information provided by the running kernel

one kernel per language (so you can run snippets from several files, all in the same namespace)

interrupt or restart the kernel if anything goes wrong

use a custom kernel connection (for example to run code inside Docker), read more in the "Custom kernel connection (inside Docker)" section

Plugins for Hydrogen

How it works

Hydrogen implements the messaging protocol for Jupyter. Jupyter (formerly IPython) uses ZeroMQ to connect a client (like Hydrogen) to a running kernel (like IJulia or iTorch). The client sends code to be executed to the kernel, which runs it and sends back results.

Why "Hydrogen"?

Hydrogen atoms make up 90% of Jupiter by volume.

Plus, it was easy to make a logo.

Contributing

Thanks for taking the time to contribute. Take a look at our Contributing Guide to get started.